The Newsroom Recap: Jerry — and Sorkin's — Criminal Laziness

We were never going to like Jerry Dantana. He's the kid who always raised his hand at the front of the class even when he only knew half the answers. He's a suck-up and a fill-in and an outsider who's a little too eager — and a lot more interested in his own career than in the good of the team. He wants them and us to believe in him even though they and we don't know him and have no investment in his story arc, or lack thereof. That we knew he threw the members of our beloved newsroom under the bus before we even met him didn't help, but we were never going to like Jerry because, as Don more succinctly put it, "Jerry has committed the crime of not being Jim Harper."

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Now he's committed a much larger crime: that of being lazy. As has Aaron Sorkin, who sometimes likes to put on a greatest hits album and hope we don't notice. Albeit much less likable, Jerry is the journalism equivalent of Lt. Daniel Kaffee from A Few Good Men. Both had information that someone had died at the hands of the military, both knew it was being kept a secret by those on high, but neither was a witness to any of it and their proof was shaky at best, false at worst. They believed in Santa Claus, but only had someone else's account of seeing eight (or nine) reindeer to go on.

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But where Kaffee researched and fought and gathered the evidence, and then bluffed the rest to goad Colonel Jessup into a public admission on the stand, Jerry just doctored the tape when he couldn't get what he wanted. He was exhausted by seven months of reporting and concerned it might all go to waste, so he took the easy way out. Because in his mind he had it, and no one would fight the means when they were justified by the end. Lying was his way of goading the military into an admission. "You got us!"

And then Jerry rested on his laurels despite having another six months of a Will McAvoy "in other news" montage, including everything from the 2012 Election to the Affordable Care Act and the Chick-Fll-A controversy, between when Jerry interviewed Staninslaus Stomtonovich and when Genoa finally went to air in September.

It's tough to tell why Jerry took that one step too many — whether he really believed in the moral imperative and the failings of the Obama administration and wanted justice so badly to be done that he'd use any means, or whether he thought sending war criminals to jail would look really good on a résumé. Probably both, though neither is really endearing. But with the evidence provided by Cyrus West, Eric Sweeney, Hamni8, Leon Deet, the weapons manifest, Stomtonovich, and Genoa crew chief Herman Valenzuela, and without the luxury of looking over Jerry's shoulder as he edited the word "if" out of the tape, I would have raised my hand to give the green light to Jerry in the second Red Team Meeting. Mostly because Jim finally did and we all trust him.

Unfortunately and inexplicably none of it was true. What the fk, Jerry?